In 2020, Hillary Talbot was living in Santa Cruz, spending her off-hours surfing, sailing, and snow skiing when she could get away and her on-hours working as an advisor to startups and small businesses. She ran a company she founded, Sail Community Capital, that helped entrepreneurs grow their businesses by raising capital from their community.
“Many company founders have great ideas and passion for their work, but reach a point when they have the potential to grow, need to grow to sustain operations, but don’t know how to raise money and scale,” said Talbot. “They don’t know how to approach investors, maintain presentable books, and are generally maxed out in time and energy.”
The energetic Talbot could help with all of these things.
Also in 2020, Jenny Kuan was teaching entrepreneurship at Cal State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and thinking about her research from her days as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, where she studied networks and how networks form, which led her to the early venture capitalists. Venture capital (VC) is a highly networked industry and Kuan discovered that collaboration was vital in the formative years of VC in Silicon Valley.
Kuan learned something else. Female founders receive only two percent of VC funds in the US, minority founders are largely overlooked, too, and few founders outside of Silicon Valley, especially those who did not attend Stanford or Harvard, are funded by VC.
At CSUMB, Kuan had an idea sparked by a female colleague who had been an executive in a large tech firm that was acquiring other companies, selling off divisions, and making big financial moves. The colleague felt she had been left out of conversations her male colleagues were having, even though she was just as senior.
“I realized that if we could educate experienced women on venture capital, we might support more female founders,” Kuan recalled. “I talked to my colleague about starting a class and what I should teach. She loved the idea.”
Kuan went to work, developed a course—Venture Capital for Women 101—and to make it accessible, she planned to teach it during lunch and free of charge.
At this time, Kuan and Talbot crossed paths.
“I met Jenny when I was invited to be a guest speaker at the monthly meeting of CSUMB’s Institute for Innovation and Economic Development (IED),” said Talbot. “Jenny was involved with IED and she was interested in my work.” (Kuan is now the executive director of IED.)
“Hillary was doing really cool projects and operating all on her own, which I thought was incredible,” Kuan said.
A little backstory: Talbot grew up in Vermont and moved to Lake Tahoe so she could Alpine ski race while receiving a BA in international studies with a minor in entrepreneurship from Sierra Nevada University. She began supporting small businesses at an incubator in the North Lake Tahoe region and by the time she was in her thirties became an early-stage investor, a consultant with California Manufacturing and Technology Consulting (CMTC), and a four-time business founder. She moved to Santa Cruz in 2017 to live with her then-boyfriend and made it the home base of Sail Community Capital.
Jenny Kuan was raised in Michigan and moved to California to attend Stanford, where she received a master’s degree in industrial engineering. In her spare time, when most of us would have been napping, she also became a professional violinist. Kuan began applying to orchestras in the Bay Area and wondered why they were all nonprofits. At this point, she had a baby at home and decided that life as a student made more sense in the early years of motherhood and that she might learn more about nonprofits by studying business at UC Berkeley.
Back to 2020, when Kuan was ready to teach her class, she knew that an important part of the education for women should include the way that early VCs collaborated by meeting informally over lunch to talk about the companies they funded, help one another with the problems they were having, and co-invest.
Kuan invited Talbot to take her course. Talbot did, and it wasn’t long before the super-active skier, surfer, sailor, and now runner was itching to start a fund. Typically, VCs create a fund and select approximately 10 “portfolio companies” to support per fund.
Talbot asked Kuan to partner with her to start her first fund.
“I don’t do things,” Kuan told Talbot. “I hope my students go off and do things. I’m a professor. I research. I teach.”
“Well, I’m not doing this without you,” said Talbot.
Kuan thought about it and decided she could justify a side hustle in venture capital as a field experiment. She asked herself, “If we had this fund, what would we invest in? Could we even find any good companies to put a theory to the test? What could we learn?”
This was during the pandemic when the stock market rallied unexpectedly. “Many people who own stocks found themselves with a windfall and wanted to use it to help others,” said Kuan. “Some people refer to venture capital as ‘vulture capital,’ but that is a misunderstanding of what venture capital has historically been; it can be impact-driven.”
Soon être Venture Capital was born—a VC company by, for and about women and underserved founders, which isn’t the only big idea that separates être from most VC firms. Big ideas is another. être is mission-driven and funds technologies that solve large, societal challenges, primarily in health care, the environment, and economic empowerment.
Talbot’s father is French and she chose the name être, which means “to be” or “to come into being.”
“The things we are doing we really, really believe in,” said Kuan.
Talbot and Kuan interviewed potential clients through Talbot’s relationship with CMTC, but none worked out. That year, 2021, Kuan was a visiting professor at Tulane University in New Orleans where she met Trivia Frazier of Obatala Sciences, a biotechnology company that was promising but undercapitalized. Obatala became être’s first portfolio company.
“When we invested in Obatala, organ-on-a-chip was in its nacsency,” said Talbot. “We knew it could be used for rapid drug discovery and were starting to hear about the FDA wanting to get away from mouse modeling. Obatala was able to speed up the time it takes to bring drugs to market and also reduce animal testing by using discarded human tissue for drug testing.”
“New Orleans doesn’t have a VC industry and Trivia, a Black woman, was in the process of raising capital,” Talbot said. “It’s difficult for all founders to find a lead investor, and it’s difficult for female and minority founders to find investors of any kind.” être believed in Frazier and her work and stepped up to lead.
In VC, a lead investor not only provides capital but prices a company—the correct term is “valuation,” structures the deal terms, provides support and guidance, and takes fiduciary control of the company by taking a seat on the board.
Kuan said they have been surprised at how few VCs lead. “Startups need a lead investor to determine the price of the shares, which organizes other investors.”
Talbot had been a presenter at the Water, Energy and Technology Center at Cal State Fresno, where she met Wendy Owens, the founder of a firm that became être’s next portfolio company. Owens founded Hexas Biomass, a producer of plant-based raw material that is carbon negative and can either replace wood to build materials, textiles and more or can be used as fuel. She needed a lead investor.
A bit more on how VC works: When a VC begins by creating a fund, the VC raises a predetermined amount from investors that the VC will invest in a number of portfolio companies—funds the VC will have for about 10 years. The typical number of portfolio companies the fund managers select is about 10.
Success is measured in two primary ways in VC, which is well-known to be high risk, high reward. VCs choose companies they believe will return 10 times on the initial investment and that will have an “exit,” which means the firm will be acquired or have an initial public offering (IPO).
In être’s first fund, Hexas was the first to be acquired, which took four years and happened in December, 2025.
“Hexas is going to have a big environmental impact and we got to be a part of that,” said Kuan. “The founder is happy with the deal, and that’s also important. Somebody else is going to take the baton, and it’s just huge.”
Obatala is another of être’s successes though it has not yet been acquired. With être’s support, Obatala has attracted significant new customers (pharmaceutical companies), is cash-flow positive, and growing.
Another of être’s portfolio companies, hampr, on the surface, doesn’t sound like a big idea solving a big problem. The online platform matches people who need their laundry washed with people who live near them who will wash their laundry. But similar to what Uber did for those who need part- or full-time work with flexible hours and independence—and no boss—hampr provides a new kind of earning power: income for stay-at-home parents, caregivers, the elderly and anyone who wants to work flexibly from home.
“Jenny and I love the trash-to-treasure space,” said Talbot. “That’s where garbage is upcycled before it hits the landfill. Eorte in Los Angeles has captured our interest.” The hotel industry adds 12 million tons of linen waste to the landfill annually—white cotton sheets and towels—and Eorte is diverting it to create uniforms for medical and hospitality staff. “The founder worked for iconic fashion brands like Guess, bebe and LaCoste, and he has a flair for design,” Talbot said.
So, how does one become a venture capitalist? You have to be rich, right?
“I drive a Subaru Forester,” said Talbot. “I’m not wealthy. Anyone can start a fund and attract capital from high-net-worth individuals as well as institutions such as foundations, college endowments, and pension funds. It’s all about convincing them that you have skills.”
So there’s that. Conversations with Talbot and Kuan are peppered with jargon such as fractional talent, seed and pre-seed funding, LP (limited partner), C-Suite, and more. Some services they perform are: develop startup teams, lead funding rounds, engineer successful exits, and much more. The breadth and depth of their knowledge certainly sounds convincing, and Kuan’s academic and professional background gives enormous cred to the pair.
“We’re so complementary, I’m 100 percent certain I would not be doing this without Hillary,” said Kuan. “She’s strategic and so detailed. She has really good instincts and sees opportunities. She also creates community and is an incredible networker.”
Talbot spoke about her partner, “Jenny has an ability to see the big picture and consistently guides our company toward solutions with remarkable patience. She’s an excellent teacher, too, which is how we’re able to help so many learn to do what we’re doing. And we’re just beginning.”
To find companies, Talbot likes to “hunt.” She looks online at accelerators and searches relevant topics that pique her curiosity. être also receives referrals from their network, and more recently, they receive cold outreach from new online platforms that promote fundraising services to founders, which is unwanted VC junk mail because few companies meet what être is looking for.
When evaluating a potential client, the dynamic duo considers whether the idea behind a company’s product or service is big enough to IP–go public–and whether it fits their mission. Then they look at whether the business has acquisition companies in mind, if there are current customers as well as diverse types of potential customers, and sufficient support to get to market and test the business’s hypotheses.
Kuan and Talbot have now designed four courses that are taught at no charge: Breaking Into Venture Capital: A Starter Class for Women; Venture Capital for Women 101; Venture Capital Investing for Women; and Lead Investor Training.
“Teaching is a superpower,” said Kuan. “I had been in academic places that emphasized research, where teaching is treated like a burden and class sizes are large. At CSUMB, the focus is on teaching. I love it!”
In the past five years, more than 400 women and a few men have graduated from être’s VC classes, and the courses are only the first phase of a larger vision to shift the paradigm. Kuan and Talbot are building a more inclusive VC ecosystem by introducing the women graduates to the partners’ existing network and to each other for support and to form partnerships.
“More venture capitalists are needed, especially women who can lead companies,” said Kuan when asked about the future of être.
By definition, venture capitalists support the companies they fund with managerial guidance, but être believes the high level of support they provide to their portfolio companies distinguishes them from other VC firms. In fact, it’s their business model.
“We want to be their first call on their best day and on their worst day,” said Talbot. “We’re here to help fix whatever issue they’re experiencing.”
“Many VCs do what is called ‘spray and pray.’ They spread cash around,” Kuan said. “That’s not how it works. I teach in the class that success comes from hard work. être is doing the work.”
“There are universities producing great intellectual property, like UC Santa Cruz, but 99 percent have trouble commercializing the technology. The government, the Department of Defense, all these guys have trouble getting stuff commercialized,” said Kuan. “Most of the time, they overlook the hard business side, the business problems that need to be solved, the hands-on good management. This role has been undervalued. Who was the third guy at Apple? Mike Markkula.”
Markkula, a trained engineer and already wealthy through tech success, was the third person at Apple at age 33. He has been called “the real power at Apple” and the “adult in the room” as he provided founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with startup and managerial guidance.
There are tech startup support groups and individual investors in Santa Cruz County currently, and some that have waxed and waned: incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and the like. Many communities with strong university research experience a “brain drain,” a loss of students after they graduate due to a lack of high-level jobs to retain them. When asked about UC Santa Cruz as a source of startups, Talbot said UC Santa Cruz lacks a business school to support technologies that are developed.
“UCSC is great at research but is missing the commercialization piece to harness the talent. This is why investor education is so important,” said Talbot.
Kuan and Talbot have begun conversations with UCSC’s tech transfer office to start a program to train investors. “We think there’s a potential synergy here with all of the great intellectual property coming out of UC Santa Cruz, along with the business school at CSUMB and the women in venture capital we train, some of whom are sidelined before their time or retiring too early,” said Kuan.
“There has been some good work done in our community, but I feel that we’re passing a torch between the previous generation of investors and the new,” Talbot added. “Many people coming out of tech earn $300,000 or half a million or more who could write $15,000 or $25,000 checks for startups, but they’re not encouraged to do so.”
Talbot’s favorite part of being a venture capitalist goes back to Kuan’s research, where early VCs met to talk about the problems facing them and their portfolio companies.
“We’re honest about the knowledge gaps we have,” said Talbot. “We tap our colleagues and co-investors for industry knowledge or technical expertise that we don’t have.”
Kuan said that her research also shows that it was a remarkably small number of people the early VCs started with. “If we could recreate that here with a small number of women with the right spirit, it could become something really, really big. Very few people can make a huge impact,” Kuan said, sounding like Margaret Mead, the famed cultural anthropologist.
“We’re having the time of our lives,” Kuan said.
“It’s the most fun I’ve ever had,” Talbot added.
PULL QUOTE:
Kuan went to work, developed a course—Venture Capital for Women 101—and to make it accessible, she planned to teach it during lunch and free of charge.
At this time, Kuan and Talbot crossed paths.
